WBAX

Hi Again,

I have been busy of late working on stuff that I have here for others. I have had some stuff here for quite some time and for what ever reason have not got it done. So now that I am Married to my beautiful wife Amanda and things are settling down a bit it is time to get in and get some stuff out of the way. Anyway here is a shot of a model that I completed a couple of years ago.

This is a Broad Gauge Bodies WBAX that a friend gave me. It had a really bad bow in the body and needed lots of work. So I went about trying to pull the body apart so I could straighten the sides. This was a bit of a disaster, One of the sides shattered into about 5 pieces. The roof didn't fair too well also. Anyway it sat in the spare box for a little while until one day at an exhibition I come across some old US outline box cars in a second hand stall. The roof on these cars looked to have the similiar pressing pattern as the flat roofed WBAX so I grabbed them for $5.00 ea in hope that I maybe able to use them for the project. When  I got home I examined some photo's that I had and the roofs were about as close as I was ever going to find.

The project was under way. I pieced back the shattered side as good as I could glued it all back together so only the roof remained. I then went about cutting roofs off the US cars. Both roofs had to be used for the job as they were 40 ft cars. I had to cut them down the center line. US cars are a lot wider so to narrow the roof I took it out of the center to leave the rivet line on the out side of the roof. It took lots of fiddling and filling to get the result I was after. The main thing that may be at fault is My Van only has 16 roof panels where the Prototype has 17 panels but I can live with that for now. After a bit of paint and a fair weathering job the finished result I think is a reasonable representation of one of these flat roofed WBAX Vans. I am pretty sure we will see these Vans RTR one day so when that happens I am sure I will enjoy adding more to my roster. The flat roofed Vans were pretty rare for my era up here on the coast but there plenty of the high roofed ones getting around right up till about 1996/7.

Cheers Justin Moy    

NLCX

Hi, Welcome to my first post. I thought I would start with a NLCX that I have been working on. Now the history of it. By my era of 1990/95 they were pretty rare up the coast. From photo's around 1990 there was only one running up the coast regularly. It was used for Trackfast and worked up to Murwullumbah. It would usual run with Banana Vans so it will make a nice mix with the Vans. Unfortunitly the NLCX suffered the same fate the NLBF Banana Vans with the fact that they used former Riveted LLV type underframes. This lead to operation problems with running in much larger Trains. This lead to the demize of the Banana Vans as the BGF was asked to replace the LLV framed wagons. There replacement came in the form of Trucks and all their GLV framed wagons were retired as well. I am not sure if many of the NLCX's were still runnnig around Metro as my sightings around the early 1990's were mostly confined to up the north coast.

The model is based around the Ian Lindsay's Kit. I have used most of the kit but completely replaced the floor. For the floor I have used a spare On Track Models LLV floor. One good thing is it is already detailed. It isn't perfect but it saves lots of work. Using this floor also makes it blend right in with all my On Track Models Banana Vans. I have added some extra styrene detail mostly around the Bloosters but still have some hand rail detail to add before in goes into the paint shop. More updates as they become available.

Cheers Justin